Phinglet, a Coat-Hook For Your Phone

There is a bartender’s gadget called the bar-blade. It’s a wide strip of metal with a beer bottle opener at one rounded-off end and a large hole at the other. When I first saw one (starting a job in a fancy London bar), I asked the bartender what the hole was for. “This,” he said, spinning the ‘blade around on his finger. “No, seriously,” I said. He fixed me in the eye, still spinning the bar-blade. “Really,” he said.

The Phinglet turns your iPhone into a bar-blade. And while it’s there, it also doubles as a kickstand. And a tripod mount.

But the best part is that the Phinglet’s inventor — Borislav Ignatov — came up with the idea after his friend suffered a “freaking accident” and dropped his iPhone into water. Sometimes a typo is truer than the intended text.

The Phinglet attaches to the back of any smooth phone or case using a peel-and-stick 3M adhesive film, the same used in various stores to stop you stealing the gadgets on display. This is also reusable, should you want to remove it. The Phinglet pivots on this sticky turret and either tucks out of the way or twists into action, putting a kind of old-style ring-pull on your phone for dangling and spinning.

The companion widget is called the Wedge, which jams into the Phinglet’s finger hole and sticks out at an angle, propping up the phone. A threaded hole will screw it onto any tripod.

In all, a neat, if maybe niche, design. Bartenders will likely pony up the $20 Kickstarter pitch right away, simply because they know how fast it is to grab from a pocket. If you wait for it to (hopefully) see full production, the Phinglet and Wedge will cost you $30–still a good deal.